I just listened to a recording of your Jan.11 meeting with the Inland Democratic Club of Mendocino County, and I feel compelled to refute the many omissions and misstatements in your comments regarding health insurance in general, and SB 562 in particular.

You say repeatedly that you believe in “Universal Healthcare” which is admirable, but I did not once hear you utter the words “single payer” or “Medicare for All.” What this omission tells me is that you believe the future of health insurance in California should be left in the hands of the private for-profit health insurance industry, and that a publicly administered single payer system is off the table.

Your reasoning for this position — basically that Trump will never hand over Medicare, Medicaid, or VA funds to California making a publicly administered system unaffordable — is hopelessly shortsighted. Those of us who have been in the single payer movement for a long time don’t expect that it will happen overnight with the passage of SB 562. What we do expect is for the State of California to have a single payer plan on the desk of the new Democratic President on Jan. 20, 2021. Your artificially imposed short term deadline is no excuse for selling out a public single payer option in favor of permanently locking in the private for-profit health insurance racket.

I shouldn’t even have to say this next part because it’s so obvious, but it seems to be completely lost on you and your Select Committee: the reason a publicly administered single payer health insurance system is so essential to the future of universal healthcare in California is that single payer is the only way to achieve the “cost containment” that you claim to be so concerned about with SB 562. It’s really very simple, administrative costs with single payer are a fraction of the cost of multi-payer private for-profit corporations, which will save billions of dollars. Also, single payer eliminates hundreds of millions in advertising expenses, executive salaries and stockholder profits, money that can then be used to pay out health insurance claims. As long as you continue to support multi-payer private for-profit health insurance, you will be trapped into thinking of cost containment only in terms of cutting benefits; this to me is unconscionable.

Perhaps the reason you discount the actuarial soundness of a public single payer system is because you are relying on the discredited preliminary Senate Appropriations Committee financial report that predicted SB 562 will cost $400 billion a year, a report which deliberately underestimated the administrative cost savings of a single payer system. An independent study (Economic Analysis of the healthy California single-payer health care proposal (SB-562, May 2017) by the Political Economy Research Institute of the University of Massachusetts -Amherst, (which your Select Committee has conspicuously refused to consider), gives a detailed actuarial analysis of SB 562 with hard numbers on how it would work. (I suggest you read it!) That single payer works is confirmed by the fact that every other developed nation on Earth has some form of publicly administered single payer health insurance system; so it is disingenuous of you to argue otherwise.

I’ve heard you deny that large campaign contributions you receive from the health insurance and pharmaceutical industries have any influence on you, but to be blunt, I think it is condescending of you to expect your constituents to believe that these special interests give you money out of the goodness of their hearts. They want you and your Select Committee to keep them in their highly lucrative business, and that is exactly what you are doing against the interests of your constituents.

In your recent meeting with the Inland Democratic Club of Mendocino County you made the offhanded remark that Speaker Rendon “is my boss.” Wrong Assemblyman Wood, your constituents are your boss, and its high time you started working for us instead of your high rolling corporate donors.